


A Bell Once Rung

by Peregrine_Lost



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Gen, Post Reichenbach, Reichenbach Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-08
Updated: 2013-02-08
Packaged: 2017-11-28 14:36:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/675490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Peregrine_Lost/pseuds/Peregrine_Lost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of snapshots of John Watson's life without his flatmate, framed by a pesky ringing in his ears that won't leave him in peace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Bell Once Rung

The aftermath of the fall was a jumbled blur for John Watson. As time passed it felt more and more like fragments of a bad dream, dissolving in the light of examination. Its history was painted in broken strokes by an unsteady hand. Here, there was a world suddenly sideways, and the abruptness of the hard pavement. There, the squeeze of the hands of strangers, soon to be replaced by others in a parade of sympathy that never seemed to quite touch him. Sitting in the police station and suddenly noticing the slightest drop of blood on his sleeve, a pinprick of darkness that expanded to blot out all else. The first time afterward setting foot in the flat he had shared when he went to collect some things, feeling mocked by all the tiny details that only made the absence of others more apparent. A newspaper scattered across the couch, pages spread out like a flock of birds. A mobile charger in an outlet, ferrying power to nowhere. A lone slipper lying where it had fallen off, its mate nowhere in sight. When those shards of recollection would spring back up at him unprompted, they pierced like a bullet once had; fire and concussion that left a gaping hole in their wake.   
  
Still, time slipped by, as a combination of nights in the strangling embrace of tangled sheets and fugue-like days drifting without direction. In daylight he had slowly freed himself of the endless replay of that one instant in time. At night, it plagued him in the cracks between sleep and waking, waking and sleep, again and again, and he found there was no defense against it. But the one constant that had never left him, dreaming or conscious, was the ringing. Ever since he'd been sent sprawling on the pavement - _a cyclist? It was a cyclist? What color was the bike? Had he worn a hat? Did he catch a glimpse of mud caked in the tire treads? Was there something he should have seen…?_ Ever since then the ringing had stayed on as an undesired companion, a cloying tinnitus in his ears that pulled him away from every voice he tried to focus on; the lingering echo of a bell once rung. He hadn't been hit that hard, fallen that hard. "Psychosomatic", surely. Yet there it was, expanding in silence and contracting again when he forced himself to pay attention to mundane matters.  
  
In the Army, of course, he had seen many soldiers in shock; glass-eyed and vacant, staring beyond the world at their own private horrors. He often thought might have been easier to have remained in shock, remained disconnected from the unrepentant march of life without. As it was, he found some senses heightened to the point of painfulness. He'd largely given up reading the paper; initially they'd been intentionally kept from him, though he'd still been assaulted by the stark, unavoidable headlines. Now that the morbid magnetism of it all had faded to back pages and then to nothing, their contents just seemed too achingly, insultingly trivial and empty. At the prompting of his therapist he had tried to write, for a while, but the black of the cursor blinking against the vast white screen seemed unbearable. He had no words left in him anyway; they'd taken flight for greener country. The bulb in the lamp by his bed was a particular irritant, buzzing like a trapped and willful wasp. Once he had nearly hurled it at the wall just for something to do, something that might cause a chain reaction that could destroy the claustrophobic prison of the everyday.   
  
For a time immediately after he had been bundled off to stay with his sister, an involuntary bit of rest that everyone had insisted upon. He knew that the motivation was mainly to save him from the jaws of predatory journalists. Lestrade had put it that it was more like to save the journalists from him, and at the train station John had in fact punched one of them in the jaw for their trouble. He didn't remember the incident at all. A change of mobile number and of venue had chased away all but the most resolute tabloid hounds, and it was only a short while before they were chasing after the indiscretions of someone more famous and more attractive than he was. For some stretch, too, the message alert on his phone was going off constantly. He'd had to switch it to vibrate and then remove it from his person and then his presence entirely to stop himself lunging for it whenever the little light came on. That little light of hope, impossible to extinguish even in the depths of his despondency. It was always only comment alerts from the blog, or occasionally a check in from Lestrade or Molly. At first they had come in like a vast flood, and of course he hadn't read any of them; but he could tell from involuntary glimpses of the subject line that they were not the attacks he had expected, but rather message after message of sympathy from strangers. They became more sporadic over time but still continued on. Once Lestrade had let slip that Mrs. Hudson had called to complain to him that people had been round putting up some kind of fliers. He only registered something about "Watson's Warriors", though he couldn't imagine what they were fighting now that both the battle and the war had been lost. He had no energy or interest to pay it any mind. People would carry their banners if they would and it had nothing to do with him.   
  
Living with his sister hadn't gone too well; mainly because he was unready for the demands of her company and her attempts to "cheer him up".  Words were said, and by mutual agreement he had moved back to the one-room flat he'd had… before. He couldn't bear to structure the reality of his life in anything more specific than "before" and "after"; the parts in between were too painful to name. He had never been sure why he'd kept that flat, but for reasons he chose not to examine he'd continued to pay the rent from his Army pension. Now he was glad of it, dismal as it was, since it saved him some little trouble at least.   
  
Mrs. Hudson would come round once a week, always putting on the same show that the visit was unplanned and she was just in the neighborhood. She would express concern over his eating habits and foist assorted plastic containers of food upon him. He usually didn't get around to eating it, having developed a deep instinctive distrust of all plastic containers in fridges thanks to too many bad experiences… in the past. He would catch his hand hovering in hesitation over one when he inevitably forgot what it held and feel piteous. Mrs. Hudson would fuss that his place was in a state, and bustle about tidying up stray clothes or dishes that hadn't made it as far as the sink. More than once she proclaimed with more enthusiasm than seemed necessary that "men must be biologically incapable of keeping a house in order". Under other circumstances he might have found her overly tender care frustrating and sometimes claimed as much, but as things were he privately welcomed the warmth of her overlong goodbye embraces.  
  
He had seen Molly a few times as well. She would sit across from him over a sandwich, and always talk just to the left of his gaze. He couldn't shake the absurd feeling that she was half expecting that at any moment he'd grab a butter knife and try to end it all. Sometimes, to amuse himself in a bitter and sardonic way, he would subtly look around whatever restaurant or coffee shop they met in for theoretically tools he could use to harm himself. It was a macabre game, trying to imagine an effective suicide with a packet of creamer, but it was better than none at all. Meanwhile Molly would nervously ramble on with determined cheerfulness about things he forgot a few moments after they were said, only to sink into an uncharacteristically solemn silence when she lost steam. Lestrade, surprisingly, was of the most comfort of all, better by leagues even than his therapist. He didn't try to erect a facade of normalcy, or fill the shared space of loss between them with chatter. They could just sit, and drink, and talk in brief turns about nothing of even the vaguest import. Those were the only moments where he felt he could let out the breath he was holding in all the rest of the time. None of them ever remarked upon the fact that he had begun to limp again, faintly most of the time but on his bad days resorting to his cane. All of his days were bad days. It was just that some of them were worse.   
  
There were things that he refused to tell any of them. Things he couldn't say aloud. Things he couldn't have borne even typing, if he'd still been writing. He couldn't even quite form it into a thought. It was a shadow out of the corner of his eye, an instant where he'd suddenly hear his name whispered in a crowd, a flash of bundled blue on the Tube. Once he'd forced himself to leave his flat to pick up takeaway and wound up running down the street for several blocks, certain that he'd seen a familiar outline vanish around a corner just beyond the reach of certainty. He felt more than foolish, panting in the cold air, hands on his knees and cheeks flush with more than exertion, winded and wretched. And somehow every time his heart would leap into his throat like a hounded gazelle, even though he knew it was only desperate need for hope made manifest. Then each time he realized the futility of it all the sound of the world would drop out as if some cosmic cable had been wrenched free of its socket, and his vision would tilt and spin. And there was the bell, closer than ever.   
  
And still when the night held its starless court he would awaken from the grip of the same formless but visceral nightmare unable to do more than stare at the ceiling, half expecting to find some strange angel clinging there he could ask for respite. But all he could ever feel was the cold skin of sweat and tears drying on his cheeks, and all he could ever hear was his heart pounding in his ears and that terrible, omnipresent ringing. And he'd wonder whether he even wanted the echo of that bell to fade away, or whether he could bear the silence that would follow.


End file.
